Digital Corporate Communications

CHALLENGECorporate social responsibility and transparency have become a much higher priority for corporations everywhere – sustainability is a critical element in promoting not only a company’s culture and contributions but also its employer brand, especially for recruiting younger workers.

Macy’s Corporate Communications needed a new, highly engaging and content-rich platform to promote its great work in sustainability for both internal and external audiences. Macy’s and Sanger & Eby had previously collaborated on the Macy’s Green Living website, but content was updated only sporadically and awareness was low.

As a large percentage of the potential internal audience (associates in stores and distribution centers, for example) lack Internet access at work they needed a way to access the site easily on their own time, and since mobile had already surpassed desktop traffic, an outstanding mobile experience was key.

STRATEGYMacy’s partnered with Sanger & Eby to design, develop, and promote a new Macy’s Green Living website, including a positioning strategy, design, content development, interactive tools and features, SEO, website development, and ongoing content creation. The new macysgreenliving.com highlights the tremendous work that the retailer has accomplished as a company to reduce its carbon footprint and become a leader in sustainability and corporate social responsibility.

We worked with Macy’s to enrich the content and provide interactive features, including a motion graphic video written and produced in-house and a custom solar dashboard that provides real-time statistics on the energy and money saved daily by Macy’s solar energy installations.

Our team created a responsive site with an outstanding user experience across all platforms, with a fresh, new look and intuitive feel to maximize access and engagement. Based on information provided by Macy’s as well as our own research, we developed a detailed content strategy with a rich and varied content base and optimized the site for search engines using SEO best practices. Within a year of launch, we upgraded to a weekly content publishing schedule keep the site updated, and developed an extensive internal marketing campaign to drive traffic to the site and keep users apprised of new content.

An interactive quiz platform and photo upload tool with voting functionality make it easy to run frequent contents that drive site traffic and deepen engagement without requiring extensive development work. Built on Umbraco Forms and a highly customized implementation of SlickQuiz, the contest platform records quiz results so users can enter to win prizes based on their scores, or enter a random drawing, depending on the contest parameters.

Macy’s is one of the Top 10 U.S. Corporate Solar Champions, and the website highlights solar energy generation on a continual, automated basis – a solar energy dashboard is featured on each page throughout the site, and calculates the impact of Macy’s solar energy with multiple equivalencies, including carbon offset, dollars saved, and miles not driven.

Complex logic calculated and displayed in a simplified visual dashboard

Within a year of launch, we upgraded to a weekly content publishing schedule keep the site updated, and developed an extensive internal marketing campaign to drive traffic to the site and keep users apprised of new content.

We developed a second version of Green Living for Macy’s, Inc.-owned retailer Bloomingdale’s – bloomingdalesgreenliving.com. The site has the same look and feel as Macy’s Green Living, but showcases Bloomingdale’s-specific sustainability accomplishments.

RESULTS

Site traffic grew exponentially over the first year, and exploded again following the implementation of weekly content publishing and internal marketing plan, with traffic growing more than 1,000% in 24 months. More than 70% of the site’s traffic now comes from mobile devices, and Green Living’s content and marketing principles have been rolled out to additional corporate communications platforms within the organization.